Writing and illustration

One of my favourite Peep Show episodes is the one where Jez and Mark get lost in the country at night. Jez immediately wants to call mountain rescue, despite Mark’s withering ‘this isn’t the Matterhorn, Jeremy, it’s the Quantocks.’

Jez isn’t having any of it. ‘You’d prefer to die than ask for a simple piece of help,’ he huffs.

Oho. Help is rarely simple, to us Marks. It’s deeply, mortally awkward. It’s embarrassing. Inconvenient. We’re supposed to manage. Asking for help is the end of the world. It feels exactly like making a Matterhorn out of a Quantock.

Imagine if we could. If we all ran our worlds in beautifully functioning isolation, we’d exist like an archipelago, a string of atolls and islands. If everyone was perfectly fine, thank you very much, there would be nothing to bring us together. We wouldn’t know how to cohere. We couldn’t build.

Shame-meets-vanity about your struggles may feel like it keeps you safe; but it hides something far more important. What hurts you is pointless suffering, until you remember that other people are hurting too. Your time on the floor is what makes you even more precious to others, because the more you’ve been helped, the better you can help in turn. Your kindness becomes a patchwork of everyone else’s; your strength is topped up because of the breach in the wall which let others flood in.

When it matters, I write it down. If it defies the words at hand, I get drawing. Since we had cave walls to paint on, and fires to sing around, others have done the same. Refusing to believe that it is not important, what we love, what we lose; how we live. Knowing that the best way to honour human experience is to witness it. To, in T.S. Eliot’s cry, set down / This set down / This…

There is more help than you could ever realise, if you know how to let it find you. It’s in books, in poetry, in film, in music, in theatre, in art, heck, even in online articles and podcasts. Human beings you have never met, ready to slip their hand into yours. Some of them have been waiting for silent centuries. Their ideas, their stories, glint like sea glass among the pebbles, waiting for you to pick them up; you, someone they never knew existed. When you need to regather the pieces, fragments of their soul become yours too.

Here are just a few of the shining threads I’ve discovered, to stitch myself back together. Please, please. Help yourself.

On creative life‘You are here to witness and celebrate. To witness and celebrate.’
Ray Bradbury blasts through writers’ block on Radio 4’s Invisible College podcast series

‘By the way that we tell what’s happened to us, [we are] giving it back to ourselves instead of being powerless within it.’
Jeanette Wintersen, 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival talk.

‘It doesn’t matter if your dreams come true, if agents swoon and audiences cheer… What matters is the feeling that you’re doing it, every day. What matters is the work–diving in, feeling your way in the dark, finding the words, trusting yourself, embracing your weird voice, celebrating your quirks on the page, believing in all of it.’
Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly and author of How to Be a Person in the World

‘It starts with passion even before it starts with words.’
Rebecca Solnit, How to be a Writer

‘The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.’
Zadie Smith, Fail Better

On the debt owed to truth‘You don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.’ Hilary Mantel, BBC 2017 Reith Lectures

On making mistakes‘Failure teaches us precisely what we need to know; it is intimate knowledge, custom made, which cannot be gained any other way. Failure is always forward motion.’
Anne Michaels, Infinite Gradation

On how not to be quite so much of an idiotThe School of Life’s Book of Life

‘We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.’
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

On working out what you want to do when you grow up‘For most of history, the question of whether we might love our work would have seemed laughable or peculiar.’
The School of Life, ‘A job to love’

On longing‘When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me… I live in you then like living in a country. You are everywhere. Yet in that country I can never meet you face to face.’ John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

I never wanted children. Not what you’d expect a parent to admit. (Especially one who wants her job to be writing for kids). But it’s true.

I’d got it all sorted out, aged fifteen, sat in Debenham’s coffee shop after school with my Mum. There must have been something particularly final about my wedge of chocolate cake, the thick seam of icing going hard, because I suddenly realised. Ok, I was going to die. So all I could do was face my death will as much courage as I could, and never inflict it on anyone else.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I was one of those teenagers.

Life loves to make fifteen-year-olds look silly. I’m still one of those teenagers, only with more frown lines, and my unexpected gift of a daughter, who has taught me things my fifteen-year-old self could never know.

One of them is this. There is nothing surer than the love I’ve been given for my daughter. Now it’s here, this love, it cannot ever un-be, no matter what happens to me, or to her. It’s a subatomic fact. I could go under a tube train, or lose every last one of my marbles to Alzheimer’s. I could get so sad I have to let the world go, or give in to pneumonia on the geriatric ward. It doesn’t matter a bit. Beneath the human realities of day-to-day life, the tiredness and tempers and the battle to pass on only the good things, there is a foreverness that is none of my doing.

And hey, this is just my stumbled-across turn-up-for-the-books. I don’t believe for a second it’s anything innate to parenthood. I don’t think that just because you’ve spawned yourself, you get a special insight into anything. Except maybe the value of sleep.

In fact, kids, or no kids: it’s kind of irrelevant. The buck of mortality can never just stop with you, because a good life is woven into other lives. There’s the family tree you’re born into, and beyond this, you grow your own branches.

Before you know it, there are the people you love, and the people you love on their behalf. A city of the heart, that you want to keep safe. The impossible prayer: please, not them. The blood you’d daub on the lintels, so that the angel of death would pass them over. Not this house. Please. But love is useless to stop the inevitable; this bizarre gift of existence must be snatched back.

A good life is a heavy one, pressed deep into the lives of others. A good life is more than yours to bear. It ripples out with meaning: home-grown raspberries in a stranger’s fridge, a face bright with joy at a winter party, a door knocked on a week too early. It’s all the arms that held you as a baby; all the babies you have held in yours. The weight of a good life can be unbearable, when black wings brush against the door.

Fifteen-year-old me was right to realise that being here isn’t something to pass on lightly. But she was wrong about the burden we’re born with. It isn’t death. Rather, it’s the heavy business of living itself, the Russian-doll sequence of love within pain within love. At times it can be almost impossible to tell which is which.

I think of the truth I nearly never knew. My something begun, that had always been there. I tell my daughter that we are never sure how much time we have; that the most important thing is to be as kind as possible, while we are here. Underneath this, something I’ll save for later. At the end, all you can do is gather up your useless love. Make it the place you furl yourself into, your last cry in the dark.

One Sunday about this time last year, I was sat on the rail replacement bus from Winchester, elated, my head fizzing. I was making my way back from my first ever conference for children’s writers and illustrators, organised by the lovely SCBWI. Stories twined out of my mind into the November dark.

The 2017 conference has just finished, with me where I thought I’d be then. Combing my SCBWI Facebook group for conference write-ups. Peering at Tweeted snapshots to try and feel like I was there too. This year, writer Annie Walmsley has been in my lucky shoes, the Margaret Carey scholarship helping her to be there, soaking it all up. Brilliantly, so was Louisa Danquah, who won a new scholarship for BAME writers, in this far too white, middle-class female industry.

One year on, my SCBWI tribe would be entitled to say: well, so, Ruth. What have you been up to?

To which I can only say: writing. Always writing.

I have written, I have needed to write, every day, just as I have needed to breathe, to sleep, to run. But here’s the thing. My manuscripts are no less sprawling and fragmented than this time last year. I haven’t turned out a stack of fat little projects. I don’t feel any closer to my name on a dustjacket in Daunt Books.

I knew, sat on that bus, that the year ahead would need my hardest work, my best words. I just didn’t know that the hard work would look like this.

Last year, amid the shining newness I was soaking in, the friendly faces and brilliant advice, I was coming apart at the heart. You don’t need the boring details; we all have our darknesses to bear. (‘A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor,’ as one mate told me, quoting Roosevelt). But it has made me realise: when I am at a loss, I pick up my pen. Whatever else comes down, it is the last thing to fall from my hand.

This year, I’ve written short stories. A poem or two (bargle). I’ve written deeper, better ways into my eighteenth century world; replotted, made character breakthroughs, edits and redrafts. I made a new picturebook and started my next book idea. I’ve pushed some chapters into writing competitions here and there. But most of my words have been entirely beside the point. Writing which has had no use other than to keep me here: the thin biro scrawl which has sewn me back together, the looping blue thread that has pulled me up, made me follow it through the day into the next. All the days until this one: where 2017 is nearly dead and I cannot wait for a sunnier 2018. In which, at last, I’ll be able to write out into the world.

If I want to make a living by my words, it seems only right that words have to be how I go about living. And this year, that has never been truer. I write, just as I have mad hair and a spiky nose. It is part of who I am.

This bitten-lip cocoon of a year, quiet and unseen, with nothing to show the outside world: this is the year I can call myself a writer.

Tonight is the glorious highlight of my TV year. Never mind dragons and dead armies. Keep your top on, Kit Harrington. Forget sequins and cha-cha-cha and the low-fat yoghurt in human form that is Tess Daly. Tonight, ‘The Apprentice’ is back.

I adore ‘The Apprentice’ with a deep, dark passion. Obviously. Think about it. Money-worship. Shouting. Those fart-in-a-lift team names. Teeth so white they look blue. ‘Selling’ (wince). Staggering self-regard. The grandiosity of everyone’s CVs. Spray-on suit dresses. Undercooked business plans. Did I mention the shouting?

Oh all right,I don’t why I love it so much. I just do. (Most of all, I love the main man himself. Repeat after me: Alan Sugar is always right.) It’s probably something about the saga of learning, rewarded.

I got cross with myself earlier this year. I threw an internal strop about being in the middle of my life with everything still to learn. When will I stop being an effing apprentice? I wailed in my head.

2017 has shown me the answer. Never.

They say, if you write, you fall into one of two camps. You’re either a churner or a learner. Churners bash out the words, racketing up the chapters, splurging out rough drafts. Learners are always at a workshop or on a course or plugged into a podcast, struggling to get down more than a few polished sentences.

I know where I pitch my tent. I’m Team Nerd, always have been. Learning is my religion. Educational establishments are where I go to church. That feeling, when an idea flowers up and into the space over your head. When you realize something helium-true, which sends you floating high. It’s ascension and epiphany rolled into one.

With a greedy mind and a stable world and a nose made to poke into books, I was dealt a jammy hand. Formal education unfurled steadily for me, like a kind of academic escalator. The real learning has been done since I stepped off it.

These past years, I’ve been working out how to be a writer, and, the longer-term journey, how to illustrate. (Notice the lack of celebrities turning their hands to children’s illustration? It’s a technical skill you can’t blag.) I constantly have to remind myself that ‘done’ is better than ‘good’. Teaching myself with my own practice, I’m stiff and naïve and scattergun and obvious and mannered and narrow and all of these things, I realize, are remedied only by falling short again and again, each time, the gap closing a tiny bit more. Being a better apprentice. Endless doing, and redoing. Learning, and sharing what you learn, for as long as there is an eye to see, a hand to draw, a mind to dance over the page.

Stories come from everything inside one life. They might circle like sharks, sink down beneath you, resurface in another place, a flash of fin when you least expect it. There is always a fresh way to see things: a new technique to learn, a new medium to play with. It is the joy, the privilege, the endless path of the person who makes stuff. Sure, publication is one kind of mastery. Only: the moment your work is out there, finished, it is lost to you. It belongs to everyone else. But the work of making: that is never over.

Life needs us to learn all the time. Even if you’re Head Foreman or Medical Director or Chief Rabbi or First Sea Lord, you will always have to do something you’ve never done before. You’ll need to work out how to be kind, when your heart is broken. How to not roar ‘CALM DOWN!’ at the hyper toddler. How to do your tax return. How to stop memories fraying, the longer they trail behind you. How best to care for the people used to caring for you. How to feel the world aching for you to notice it. How to carry the weight of love without a home. How not to sleepwalk through another day.

We’ve never made it. We’re apprentices to the end. Especially us awkward sods, who insist on making stuff exist that wasn’t there before. We’re owed nothing; after all, no-one asked us to make it.

Lord Sugar is always right. And he’d tell you, it ain’t me you need. The business angel, Saint Alan, doling out the shiny reward, holding the golden keys to Success, he’d say: it’s down to you. What you weave with your life; everything you build from what you have within you.

Life at secondary school isn’t easy. (If you think it is, you’re the berkish little feck-face making it hard for everyone else.)

But there’s a special kind of school-time torment that only a few of us know about. The fate of the Teacher’s Kid.

You have no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you’re conspicuous. (It doesn’t help to choose a mustard, pink and purple shell-suit jacket to wear in Year 7.)

You can never, ever, not do your homework.

You hang out in the library long after the cleaners come round, part of the furniture. Only Jimmy the caretaker sees more sunsets over the blocky seventies buildings.

The only boys who actually want to go out with you have to be bit thick, a bit sad, or just a froth of hormonal desperation.

You’ve worked it out. Yes, I was a Teacher’s Kid. From the age of eleven to eighteen, before I could be me, I was always going to be Mrs Grearson’s Daughter.

‘Are you – Mrs Grearson’s Daughter?’

‘You’re Mrs Grearson’s Daughter, aren’t you?’

Eyebrow lift. Shrug. Jut chin. Wait for it.

‘Your mum caught the littlest Harkin smoking weed.’ ‘Your mum broke up a really wicked fight by the buses.’ ‘Your mum put all of 8CB in detention.’ A lower sixth-former, sobbing angrily in the toilets: ‘Your mum is a total bitch.’ As if I’d whip out a clipboard and make a note in the Grearson Family Brand Awareness Survey 1998: We Value Your Feedback.

I still get it, a scary amount of years later, out in Cov. ‘You’re Mrs Grearson’s Daughter?’ Nowadays, sometimes followed by: ‘Are you the one that strips?’, thanks to my little sister’s brief fling with pole-dancing at university.

Yep, Mrs Grearson is my mum. And Mum is a paradox. She’s the tough disciplinarian with no patience for anyone dicking about. Yet she’ll bend over backwards to help you if you really want to try. She loves seeing someone find their feet, leave school able to support themselves and their family. But as an art teacher, she also wants students to feel the value of new experiences, new ideas, new ways of seeing the world.

She’s the girl who failed her eleven-plus and was made to feel stupid, and who has spent her whole career trying to prevent any other child feeling the same. Working hard to make sure any young person can come good if they try enough. Passionately believing that comprehensive education should be precisely that: comprehensive. That all of us, no matter where we start off, should be able to go wherever life calls us, whether that’s a bang-up plumbing apprenticeship, a nursing degree, going to drama college or reading History at Oxford.

She’ll give feedback on UCAS personal statements into the wee smalls. She’ll spend hours on the phone sorting out someone’s admissions crisis, or helping solve a problem at home. She’ll tell her fellow teachers they are paid good money to work in the holidays. She’s retired now, but all that means is three days a week at a different Catholic comprehensive school in Coventry.

Mum was my first, best teacher. She stayed at home with me and my sister, baking bread and ploughing her love, fun, and creativity into our early world. But she wasn’t one of these soft, long-suffering, angel-in-the-house kind of mothers. You can’t get sentimental about her kind of parenting, because it was never self-effacing. Later on, the bread-baker became the breadwinner. She was there for us, always. But she was also out there, for everyone else too, showing us that hard work was as important a legacy as the love we were steeped in. She’s taught generations of Coventry kids. She’s now onto the grandchildren of her first pupils.

My secondary school experience was one long cringe, but in bearing it, I got to see Mum in her workplace every day. ‘I’ve never met anyone so committed to helping others develop,’ one of Mum’s colleagues told me, when I met him as a VSO volunteer. ‘Oof, she was hard on me,’ said the lad in Millsy’s last year, the one who was keen to know about my stripping CV. ‘But I needed it. Tell her thanks.’

We’re very different, me and Mum. I couldn’t be hard on anyone if I tried. Apart from being handy with a pencil, I haven’t inherited much beyond her deep frown. I ended up with my Dad’s boobs and most of his easy-going nature, too. Where I’m a puddle of reflection, Mum is a whirlwind of action. She is physically incapable of procrastination, and hates wasting time. Losing her father aged eleven, and her beloved brother in her early twenties, she’s always known that tomorrow might be too late. Something I, a born meanderer, with my sunny, peaceful childhood, have difficulty feeling in my bones.

But lately, I get it. How close it is, the place of no more time. Full of unsaid things, turns-not-taken, unwritten words. Simon Armitage’s lost, unfinishable business.

I need someone to show me how to be strong and kind and make sadness explode into hard work, and luckily, she is right there in front of me. Made of star-iron, fire, and unstoppability: my meteor of a mother.

So, yes, I am Mrs Grearson’s Daughter. I’m trying to be more so every day. And I’m trying to do her proud, because perhaps, then, she’ll see how proud I am of her.

Without others, there are no wordsMy superhero power is a bit of a niche one. I’d want to speak and understand ALL the languages in the world. Even (covfefe!) Trumptweet.

This tends to get a mixed reaction. ‘What?’ people say. ‘Wouldn’t you want to fly?’ or “Nah, invisibility – has to be,’ or ‘Going on holiday’d be a nightmare. You’d hear everything.’

I’m nosy, all right? It’s the magpie in me, head always tilted to one side, looking for the shiny glint of a story. I hate it when I can’t earwig on people’s conversations.

Worse still is how I feel when I’m floundering about in another language. It’s like a gag, the wordlessness that clots your throat. Leaving you mute and unmeaning, a tiny child again, stripped of your voice.

Meaninglessness. And being misunderstood. Two of my worst fears combined. The only thing I want in life is to have meant something to people. So yeah, Captain Earnest over here wants to be able to Mean It with everyone on the planet.

These past weeks, meaninglessness has stirred again. Struck out with bombs, blades and bullets. Brute blows that defy the burning need to understand, the quest for meaning.

What lands, like a slap in the face: the only way to respond to destruction is to keep on creating. Teeny Ariana Grande, who looks like she’d fall over if she batted those eyelashes too fast, being a ginormously marvellous egg, standing a million feet tall, singing even louder than before.

What also swipes at me: violence is a language that undoes itself. Ripping out pages, scrubbing out words. Robbing lives of time. Statements that say nothing. It is left to us to pick up the shrapnel and sit in the debris, and begin building again. We get the horrible nobility of making it mean something.

The French father, talking to his small son, after the attacks in Paris in 2015. Yes, they have guns. But we have flowers. The aching grace of holding up a shield that you know to be no shield at all.

Words – in whatever language – make a useless shield. They are broken, makeshift, incandescent chips of meaning. Bits of fly wing caught in a web, shivered by the wind. As puzzling and flawed and maddening and noble as the people who use them. Inadequate and shonky as they are, we have to choose to use them, despite that. We have to endure the rub and pinch of the places they don’t fit. And use them to keep talking to each other. That is struggle.

Athletes know exactly where their muscles give, their tendons pull. The limits of their bodies look godlike to everyone else, but they alone know exactly where better, stronger, faster falls down. When you write, you wrestle with meaning, you know where the words betray you. Where they mask what they should show: where they can’t reach. Everything that lies buried, all they can never say.

This week, the country teeters on a choice. Wherever your cross goes on the ballot paper, choose to make one, to honour the fact you can choose. We have to keep speaking the broken, clumsy language of our democracy, even when it feels like it’s not speaking to us. Keep on making the cracked tiles into a mosaic, bit by broken bit.

Because the alternative is no alternative at all. It is the tongue bitten off, spat bleeding onto the ground. It’s the animal howl, Macbeth’s tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

‘London? Hate it,’ said my Uncle Bernard once, with the magnificent contempt of a true-born son of Coventry. ‘Dirty. Grubby. Horrible place.’

Of my five uncles, Bernard’s the one that wears bow-ties and does a faultless Donald Duck impression. He’s not a man to be doubted.

Lots of people at home would agree with him. Nowhere worse than cocky, cockney London. (Except, of course, Leicester.)

It was only after I moved there, years later, that I discovered the weirdest thing.

The place Uncle Bernard hates doesn’t actually exist. London is a composite image, one of those pictures made up of lots of tiny photos. The closer you get to it, the more it disintegrates into a million pixels. It’s a mirage, our capital, a slew of smashed-together villages and towns, a patchwork of many places adding up to something both more, and less, than one city. Uncle Bernard couldn’t have spent much time in leafy Hampstead or pristine Barnes or well-heeled Dulwich and come away with his slur intact. (He could in Morden. Morden reminds me a lot of Leicester.)

Staying with friends after university, the glimpses I snatched of this ancient mirage seemed impossibly forlorn. Looking back, this is probably a sign I spent far too much time in Inferno’s on Clapham High Street. ‘London’ was grand, and shabby, and utterly indifferent. I did not belong. Only by living here did I realise: not belonging is the way that this place makes you feel at home.

Lately, I have seamed the city with my steps, stitching east to west, morning and night. Along the way, I’ve discovered pockets of newness, postcodes passed through for the first time. As they always do, these patches of London splice many times and ideas together, council flats stacked against regency stucco, strident shop signs under tired Edwardian terraces. One bus journey holds scruffy libraries, turreted schools, and blond-wood, bare-brick sourdough pizza joints. An architectural procession of preening and neglect. Endless half-familiar streets, all laced with trees, the veins and capillaries of the city.

London is a patchwork sewn together by the minds that thrum here. There are as many Londons as there are pairs of eyes, opening to see her. My London is haunted by the ghosts of other cities: Singapore, Glasgow; Paris, Berlin; Birmingham, Bath, Lagos. Snatches of my own past, handed back to me, by this huge old sponge of a place, which turns to stone under the weight of our steps. A fractured coral reef, grown from lives lived over the top of those that have gone before.

I don’t know how much longer I can cling on to my London, this kleptomaniac old dame. She kisses you with lights by the river, the sea on her breath, picking your pockets with both hands. I don’t have the golden pickaxe to hack out a little piece of her, so I’ll carry on borrowing my time here, along with everyone else who sticks to her skin.

That skin. It’s beyond airbrushing. You can’t shut out the pores on her nose, nor the cracks in her teeth. She doesn’t care what you see. There is the glory of upflung stone, the soaring bright glass. And underfoot, the pavements pocked with gum, the things people let fall. The things they don’t want.

Where you are is always a part of who you are. Right now, I’m a mudlark, combing the river, scavenging meaning from whatever the day washes up. Noticing the things no-one else has time to see. Holding tight to moments that others step over, fragments of the city falling off the backs that hurry away. I’m putting them in my pockets for later. When I can tap people on the shoulder and say: Sorry, excuse me? Sorry. You dropped this. Yes, I saw it. Here you go. Yes. It’s yours.

I ache in April, when tart green leaves uncurl, and the trees begin to breathe again.

I love trees. But I doubt they feel the same, not at the rate I make them dead. Ever since I first held a crayon, I’ve laid waste to forests of paper.

Last week, my heart full of April, I did a watercolour of spring leaves. I realised afterwards that this was a bit like painting a baby’s portrait, using skin flayed from dearly departed Great Aunt Aspidistra.

I’ve scribbled through seven notebooks since 2017 started, not counting my sketchpads, or my diary. I’ve printed off miles of HP Everyday. Right now I’m writing, surrounded by shelves bearing a lifetime’s collection of mashed tree-corpse. My words float on a screen largely powered by burnt fossilised wood. And I have the temerity to want to knit these words into more books. Sorry, trees. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

I’m not alone in my hunger for paper. In the UK last year, over 200,000 new books a year were published, more than ever before. Even as writers starting out, like me, complain about how difficult it is to Get Published. On top of the commercially published titles, access to digital printing has made it easy for people to go it alone and self-publish. Who wouldn’t want to give E.L James a run for her Fifty Shades money? Tens of thousands of people try.

And thank goodness for the long chain of (largely) passionate and talented people that link writers with the printed page. For the literary agents and the editors and the marketing teams and the booksellers, who want no tree to die in vain. Who want dead trees to bear words that will take hold of people, steal time from their busy lives, give them something irreplaceable. Something worth the arboricide. And yes, something that makes money. That recoups the time and skill and capital it’s taken, to see those words in print.

Often, writers like me, looking to Get Published, see publishing professionals as obstacles. A long line of gatekeepers, slamming the door in our faces. I like to think of them as the guardians of the forests that would otherwise perish, and leave us standing on a bald globe, with way too many weird and wonky books to read before the sun fries us to death.

I promise you this, tree-huggers. I’m not going to publish anything myself. You won’t find my baggy manuscript wearing a book-jacket on Amazon, just because I’ve decided you want to read it. It takes a team of hardworking, creative people to craft a book into the best version of itself it can be. And unless someone else thinks my story is worth working on too, I’m going to keep it firmly to myself. For the love of trees.

Free stuff! Free stuff never happens to me. I’m the kind of person who’s always delighted to pay. I say ‘thanks’ at least ten times in any given transaction. (It’s my ambition to know how to say ‘thank-you’ in all the languages of the world. So far I’m at 47).

I’m rubbish at wangling freebies because I never feel like life owes me anything. It’s the total opposite. My life has been one long procession of unlooked-for gifts. Not least the most unlooked-for, most fundamental gift of all: the fact I’m here in the first place.

So many unlooked-for gifts, a long string of bead-bright flukes. Being born in peacetime twenty-first century Britain. To my parents, who not only had the means to look after me, but who are, more importantly, the best of eggs. My farmer’s-wife constitution. My brilliant tribes of family and friends. My remarkable daughter. Gifts given with pure lottery abandon. Not because I’ve deserved them. They aren’t anything to do with merit. They are utter mysteries. No wonder I’m a serial thanker.

So I need all 47 of my words for ‘thank you’ to do honour to the generosity of everyone who’s coughed up for Cancer Research UK, on account of me running the Coventry half marathon. You helped me smash my target. Thank you all so, so much. I can’t tell you how deeply I appreciate every penny.

I ran a half marathon for Cancer Research because the trouble with unlooked-for gifts is that we never know when they will be taken away. When our grip on the hand we love best will fail. When our bodies will mutiny against us. When someone will drive a car onto a pavement. The morning you’ll leave for work, and never come home again.

I ran because sometimes the weight of our unlooked-for gifts is almost more than we can bear. I have needed running, something I once hated, this dark winter. Some days the only thing stitching me together has been the pounding of my trainers on the pavement. The unlooked-for gift gained from running further has been a stronger body. At times, that physical strength has been all that’s carried the rest of me through the day.

This week, us Londoners are holding our dearest ones a little tighter. And we’re reminded of the only thing to do, when the gifts fall from our hands. When the price of our love is exacted, as it always will be, in its loss.

We have to take the chaotic, the uncaring, the senseless, and weave meaning from it. Make it matter. Take a new bright bead and string it on the thread. Watch it gleam there. Another unlooked-for gift.